Peter and Alice, starring Skyfall's Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw, is a moving
theatrical chamber piece which couldn't be further removed from the Bond
blockbuster, says Charles Spencer.

If you had to imagine a work that was the complete antithesis of the brilliant Bond blockbuster, Skyfall, it might resemble Peter and Alice, a moving, 90-minutetheatricalchamber piece about childhood, growing up and the pressure of literary immortality.

Yet it has been written by John Logan, one of the scriptwriters on Skyfall, and stars Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw who play M and Q in 007’s latest adventure.

They both give beautiful, heart-catching performances in this haunting play that sounds profound notes of loss and grief.

The piece was inspired by a small footnote in literary history. In 1932, Alice Liddell Hargreaves, who was the model for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, met Peter Llewellyn Davies, one of five brothers into whose lives JM Barrie insinuated himself, and who inspired Peter Pan. Barrie wrote that he created the young boy who never grew up “by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame” but it was Peter who bore the name of the character that was to haunt and trouble him throughout his unhappy life.

The play shows Peter and Alice meeting in the dusty backroom of a bookshop where Alice is to open an exhibition celebrating Carroll’s centenary. Peter is there because he is a publisher and hopes to get a book out of her. At first Alice, now 80, is haughty. “You’re presumptuous,” she tells Peter, and no actress is more capable of suggesting withering disdain in just two words than Dame Judi. But Peter perseveres and they talk about the way their lives have been marked and to different extents marred by the writers and the books that trapped them in immortal youth.

But this is a play that breaks the surly bonds of naturalism – as it should in a work inspired by fantastical fiction. In Christopher Oram’s enchanting design the drab backroom gives way to Alice’s Oxford, and Peter’s Neverland with sets that resemble a Pollock’s toy theatre. The play’s characters include Carroll (Nicholas Farrell) and Barrie (Derek Riddell) and we also encounter the fictional versions of Alice and Peter, played by young actors, who comment on their older, real-life selves. Dench also carries off the astonishing feat of playing Alice in childhood and proves genuinely touching rather than embarrassing.

There is a particularly telling dramatic moment in Michael Grandage’s poignant and spellbinding production, when the old Alice asks Peter, in his thirties at the time of their encounter, whether he was “interfered with” by Barrie. She means molested, of course, and the play makes it plain that neither she nor Peter was physically abused by their respective writers. But Logan suggests that in a broader sense both were “interfered with” – subjected to the obsession and intense emotions of troubled adult authors they were too young to understand.

The losses both characters endured during the First World War are movingly captured, and though Dench is deeply affecting Whishaw goes even deeper, suggesting a man irretrievably damaged by his experience of war, and who has painfully and repeatedly learned that the only reason boys don’t grow up is because they die.

It’s a beautiful and searching play that will live long in the memory.